Spring 2015

We invite all members of our community to join us as we explore this topic through small group and large group conversations. In this conversation, we will work to 1) deepen understanding of the multiple aspects of identity that each of us possess, 2) explore the impact of unexamined assumptions on relationships and community engagement, and 3) consider the ways in which we can all work to encourage full participation within our community.

Taylor Branch is an American author, journalist, and public speaker best known for his landmark narrative history of the civil rights era, America in the King Years. The trilogy’s first book, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63, won the Pulitzer Prize and numerous other awards in 1989. Two successive volumes also gained critical and popular success: Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65, and At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-1968. Decades later, all three books remain in demand. His latest book, The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement (2013) presents eighteen key episodes spanning the era, selected and knitted together in language from the trilogy. He began his career as a magazine journalist for The Washington Monthly in 1970, moving later to Harper’s and Esquire. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Fall 2014

In this presentation Pedro Noguera analyzed the current reform agenda being promoted by states, the federal government and various advocacy groups. We also explored why issues pertaining to racial segregation and social inequality are no longer considered central to school change initiatives and the implication of allowing these issues to be ignored. Finally, we considered the possibilities for change that exist in the current period given the constraints confronting public schools.

A Conversation with Richard Rodriguez, author of Darling (Sept 16)

Darling is a collection of essays in which Rodriguez considers the complete reality of faith-based violence among the three Abrahamic religions of the desert, growing atheism in the West, the role of women in Church and society, sexuality, and other timely topics.

Los Pleneros de la 21 (Sept 18 - 19)

Dance and drumming workshop and main performance from Los Pleneros de la 21.

Founded in 1983, the group consists of three generations of venerated traditional and professional musicians, incomparable dancers and passionate educators. Los Pleneros de la 21 fuses the "down home" Afro-Puerto Rican traditions with contemporary sound to showcase their versatility and complexities of Latino experience in the United States.

To the Mine I Will Not Go (Oct 2)

Freedom and the Abolition of Slavery on the Colombian Black Pacific 1821-1852

As opposed to the United States, where slavery was destroyed in the context of a Civil War, or Haiti, where slavery was exterminated in 1804 to create the world's first black republic, the majority of republican governments in the Americas dealt with the 'problem' of slavery through a process of gradual emancipation by passing Free Womb laws in the aftermath of independence. This presentation examined the social repercussions of this Law of the Free Womb in the Republic of New Granada (modern-day Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, and Ecuador), established in 1821, specifically focusing on the Pacific Coastal province of Chocó, once the gold-mining center of the former Spanish empire. Apart from showing how this law attempted to monopolize the meaning and path to freedom as a state project, and served as a ‘national compromise’ between white, republican elites and the substantial enslaved and black underclasses, this presentation offered a more complicated narrative of emancipation and the trials and tribulations faced by the last generation of enslaved peoples in northern South America.

Cultivating Community through Dialogue (Oct 29)Providence College Difficult Dialogues Initiative

What
are the shared values that hold us together as a campus community? How
will we work collaboratively to foster belonging within our community?
How can we leverage dialogue across differences to cultivate
authenticity, belonging, and community? Members of the
Providence College community explored these questions
through small group and large group conversations.